Friday, February 12, 2016

A College President We Could Get Behind. Sent in By Eating Low Salt.

University president allegedly says struggling freshmen are bunnies that should be drowned

Too many captions...

Amid a conversation about student retention this fall, the president of Mount St. Mary’s University told some professors that they need to stop thinking of freshmen as “cuddly bunnies,” and said: “You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

Simon Newman was quoted in the campus newspaper, The Mountain Echo, on Tuesday, in a special edition that reported the university’s president had pushed a plan to improve retention rates by dismissing 20 to 25 freshmen judged unlikely to succeed early in the academic year. Removing students who are more likely to drop out could hypothetically lead to an improvement in a school’s federal retention data; the deadline for submitting enrollment data is in late September.

He said he didn’t remember exactly what he said in the conversation that was quoted, but acknowledged he has sometimes used language that was regrettable.

“I’ve probably done more swearing here than anyone else,” Newman said. “It wasn’t intended to be anything other than, ‘Some of these conversations you may need to have with people are hard.'”

I can get behind the sentiment that faculty should be honest about whether certain students should remain in college. However, he fired faculty who disagreed with him, so let's hold off on inviting him to write a guest editorial for us.

When I first read about this situation (before the firings), it struck me as the reductio ad absurdum of what you get when you put together (1) a Catholic institution with a historical commitment to serving the underserved (and perhaps, in some cases, underprepared); (2) an emphasis on raising graduation/reducing attrition rates that is basically well intentioned but subject to backfire; especially when you have (3) a metric-minded manage-by-the-spreadsheet president with a determination to run the university like a business (i.e. make sure that, above all, the numbers look good). I could understand an institution of higher education rethinking its admissions strategy in the face of high attrition (though I can also see an institution with a certain mission/ethic decide to keep giving a certain number of marginal students a chance, support them as well as possible, and take its lumps when it comes to the retention/attrition numbers, and I'd applaud that, as long as the students weren't piling up high debt loads in the process). I do not see any possible justification for trying to force out students that you admitted only months before, only weeks into the new school year (never mind whether you call them bunnies or not, and threaten them with various kinds of violent death or not, metaphorical or not, though of course all that is repugnant, and would, indeed, get most faculty members -- and certainly those without tenure -- fired immediately these days). I'm not much on the whole self-of-steam-boosting thing, but being pushed out of college only weeks in is enough to discourage any student from trying again, for a very long time, and perhaps ever (and maybe in some cases that's not a bad thing, but, if so, the selection should be coming earlier, before they're put in the position of failing at something that was never a good fit). My main thought was that the university needs to lose that president, and fast.

Now, post-firings, my thought is that the university needs to lose the president and the board that put him in place (and has continued to support him), and rehire some people.

Either that, or it needs to close, because not all small institutions are going to survive the shakeout-in-process, and if whatever combination of trustees, alumni, donors, and members of the religious hierarchy are actually running this place can't see that there's something seriously wrong here, then maybe their current and prospective students should move on to an institution that actually embraces its own stated values. Of course, that would leave the current faculty high and dry, which would be a shame.

This situation also confirms my sense that, while tenure is certainly needed to protect professors' right to speak out on issues outside the university that might bring pressure from without, it is needed even more to ensure that at least some people inside the university can speak out on university issues without fear of losing their jobs. Of course, at least in this case, it doesn't seem to be working that way.

By the way, there's some more commentary (including a timely warning to check institutional policies on talking to the press) and a link to a petition here.

Well, in an ideal world, or even the university as traditionally constituted (or our idea thereof -- c. 1960, maybe?) that would be true. However, in the current world, football players have a lot of clout, mostly economic, while professors are easily replaced, if not to a standard acceptable to current faculty (a point they make in their letter -- that this situation could harm not only student but also faculty recruiting, which, at least in my discipline, is in full swing right now, with campus visits winding up and offers being made), then certainly to a standard acceptable to a president like this, or anyone who thinks like him (look at all those un/underemployed Ph.D.s out there! Some of them are probably even desperate enough for work to commute from Baltimore! or maybe they have spouses/partners teaching in southern PA! In any case, it'll work out; it's not like bunnies need a lot of teaching anyway, just the occasional carrot, and the less-occasional stick.)

The dreaded vote of confidence: "[A] board member also appeared, to state the board's confidence in Newman. That board member, Reverend Kevin Farmer, told the faculty, 'The board continues to support President Newman.'"

This isn't going far enough. Education should be a sort of meritocratic home rule.

I currently work in an administrative division of a large, urban school district. The voters are idiots. City council is composed of idiots. The mayor is an idiot. None of them knows how to run a school district. The only people in this city who understand our school district is us.

Public Universities and public school districts ought to be held accountable to Civil Service commissions as oversight, but should not contain any officials elected or appointed from without. So for instance, in our school district, the school board should be elected by administrators and teachers. Votes should be distributed based on rank and seniority.

And I really think that all educational institutions, and most non-profit institutions, should function this way. Obviously the government can't (or, realistically in our current society, HOPEFULLY can't) make them operate that way.

Actually, the way I would do it, is I'd have TWO sort of councils, one elected by teachers and one elected by administrators. Together they would form the school board.

Teachers would have guaranteed equal representation in district governance so we could ditch the union, the money spent by the union could be returned to the teachers and students, and the time spent by administration haggling with them could be spent on other things.

Administrators would vote based on rank. Teachers would get votes based on seniority. The joint school board would function as a regular school board.

Administration and faculty are frequently at odds with one another but everyone, literally everyone, on either side acknowledges that literally anyone from the other side would run the school district better than the voters/the city.

If you followed the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District proceedings and read the trial transcripts as I did, it would affirm your opinion that school boards are composed of idiots possessed of a wonderful melange of arrogance and ignorance -- the personification of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Let's allow that many or most school boards are actually competent and simply wish to represent their constituents in charting the course for the district. They are quite willing to take to heart advice from the faculty, and they occassionally vote to give the district what it needs instead of simply what the constituents want. Such boards would, I'd think (or hope), have no problem with half of the votes being provided by faculty.

The boards who would most disdain faculty having voting rights are the boards that most need to heed the expert opinion of the faculty, for those boards know not what they do. Dover was such a board, and it seems the only way they would take faculty advice is if faculty could at least tie them in a vote.

I'm not sure if this infatuation with "outsiders" is an American thing, but it must stop. If the world champion speed skater asked to borrow your car, you'd first want to establish that they had a valid driver's license, because, FFS, said credential speaks to the issue of whether they are in some way qualified to operate a car. So how is it that when time comes to choose someone to drive the bus, "we the people" collectively say, hey, let's not pick someone who's at least driven something like a bus, let's go for the speed skater who disavows any driving experience at all?!

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.